Toward a Science of Driving: Safety in Rules-Based versus Adaptive Self-Regulating Traffic Systems

New technology emerges daily that enhances traffic and automotive systems. It challenges us to redefine safety in terms of achieving the system's overall goals at a minimal ‘cost’, i.e., loss of life and property. This redefinition requires that we develop the tools needed to understand driving as a decision making activity over a system consisting of driver, vehicle and infrastructure with an ever present and increasing flow of information between them. This even requires that we revisit the very notion of an accident. Loss of life and limb will increasingly be due dysfunctional decision-making, human and automated. This paper describes an approach to the study of driving as a system-based decision making and suggests an approach to the management of dysfunctional decisions. By making explicit, with the aid of game and systems theory, the role of information in driving we suggest a traffic-system based approach to behavioral constraints needed to ensure safety.